The TinyPortal Article Management System.

[Ken.]

The TinyPortal Article Management System.
A Beginners Guide to the TinyPortal Article Management System.

This short how-to will give forum managers/owners who have just started using TinyPortal some basic detail on how to use the TinyPortal Article System as a very easy and convenient way add and manage extra pages that you may wish to include in your site and forum.One of the things that makes an article so powerful and flexible is the fact that you can use a variety of code types to build your article including HTML, PHP, BBC and including an External article, as well as combining more than one type of code in the same article.

And you can include just about any kind of content that you want in your articles like images, animations, slide shows and the list goes on.For this basic introduction guide we'll just make a simple HTML article outlining the steps that I've gone through as this how-to is put together and published and as you will see below there are only a few steps to the process.

First go: TinyPortal > Articles > Selections... Clicking on the '+HTML' button will give us the 'Add article in category' window as seen below in the second screenshot.

*Please note that the WYSIWYG editor can be toggled on or off and for this how-to I have it turned off for most of the process because we are using only a few HTML commands to build this article. It can be very useful either way, it just depends on what's needed for your article build.

Next we need to determine what kind of content we'll have in the article and in this case all it will contain are a few paragraphs of text and a few screen shots of the various windows we opened as we built this article.

Text:
For text we simply type in anything that we need to say and add any formatting desired by using HTML tags and do the same for any images or other content we want included. If you are working with the editor on it includes a few HTML tags.

Images:
There are a number of ways to add your images, linking them from your gallery if you are using one of those, linking from one of the file sharing web sites, or my favorite, the articles built in image upload system. To use the article upload feature we use the "Upload a new image into the quick-list: Browse" button to locate the image on our computer and select it. The next time your article is saved it will upload the image and thereafter you can put the image anywhere in your article by inserting the cursor where the image should go and then by clicking the image.

... one note about images, care should be taken to be sure that images are not overly large for the page, a slow loading page, or one with lots of scroll bars might not keep your viewers interested.

And that's it for the content basics!But, as noted earlier we could add all kinds of other detail to build the article into a more dynamic and colorful end result if we want to do so.            

Display Options:

Our next step is to set all of the display options that are available and we start by looking directly below our content window where we can see some of the controls. As you see in the screen shot there are several options that can be set here for the article, here we see all of the boxes checked, but any or all of them can be left unchecked according to whatever look you want... once we are satisfied with the choices we can Save the article.

 

One last note about options:
You'll want to choose(or make) a category for your new article, it would go into the "*not assigned*" category automatically until you do select a category.
You can save the article, work on it, do whatever, but until it is assigned to one of your "Article Categories" your viewers will see a page saying, "This article isn't assigned yet." and with none of your content.

 

It's just that simple... 
But of course this is only the 'tip of the iceberg' because if you want it to, it can get way more involved and complicated as you begin to make your pages more appealing to the viewer by adding all of your great content!

And some extras:
You're actually reading the very article we just build in this tutorial, here are some screenshots showing the process.

This clip shows the article edit screen, the WYSIWYG editor has been turned on here.

And here we have the same area with the editor off:

...enjoy!

Doc Written 10/27/2015 By: Ken.